Edward Williams, who has been with Kansas City, Missouri’s police force for 21 years, has filed a lawsuit against the department, alleging he was instructed to target minority communities to meet ticket quotas.
Williams filed the suit on March 20 in Jackson County, reports KSHB News. In it, he claims that since 2015, the city’s police officers were pushed to issue large numbers of citations. Although ticketing quotas have been illegal in Missouri since 2016, he says that officers continue to be evaluated based on the number of stops and citations they write.
Although the Kansas City Police Department’s current chief, Stacey Graves, denied the allegations, Williams claims that ticketing directives came directly from her predecessor, former KCPD Chief of Police, Rick Smith.
According to the lawsuit, officers were ranked by the number of tickets they gave out. To improve their performance on that metric, they were allegedly told to target minority neighborhoods.
Read: To Serve And Collect: Massachusetts Troopers Had To Issue A Minimum Of Tickets
Williams claims that there were “directives from leadership to go to minority neighborhoods to write tickets because of the belief that it would be easier to write multiple citations on every stop.”
He further alleges that a KCPD captain said that officers should only respond to calls in neighborhoods populated by a majority of white residents, claiming that “those are the folks who are paying for the police.”
By contrast, officers were allegedly told that they should not respond to calls in “minority-filled areas north of Bannister, west of 435, south of the river, because those people do not vote the same way as the people out south, east, and north.” Racial profiling is a violation of the federal Civil Rights Act.
The allegations may not come as a surprise to many of the city’s residents. The Kansas City Star reported in 2017 that Black residents received 60 percent of traffic tickets in the city, despite making up just 30 percent of the population. Meanwhile, white residents, who make up nearly 60 percent of the population, received just 37 percent of tickets.
“Historically, African Americans have been getting stopped for (playing loud) music, for tint(ed windows), wheels, for just about anything, especially in the inner cities,” Phillip Brooks, a Kansas City lawyer told the paper. “It’s just plain and simple. You don’t get that in the suburbs.”
Williams, who is white, claims that other officers subjected him to racist rhetoric, and that he was reprimanded by his superiors after he reported violations. The suit comes months after the U.S. Department of Justice announced an investigation into KCPD’s employment practices to determine if racial discrimination had occurred there.
